Halo: ODST

xbox.com/halo

After the success of the Believe and Iris campaigns a few years back, along with Gears of War 2 last year, Xbox once again tasked my office with doing the online marketing for their next AAA title: Halo ODST. In this game you play as the rookie on a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (get it?) as you make your way through a myriad of levels killing aliens, saving humanity, and blah, blah, every first person shooter you've ever played.

While the game itself may play out like Halo 3.5, the site and production that went into it took our team marching into all sorts of brave new territories. The site revolves around an interface which allows the user to review interview footage of the 3 members of the ODST team you fight alongside in the game. During each interview, the soldiers are instructed to put a device on their head that allows you to see what they're thinking.

The interviews were shot on a sound stage in LA and were later matched up with b-roll, shot in both Budapest and SF. My role in all of this was to work alongside my co-worker and friend Jeremiah Wassom, and support his effort to assemble the video feeds of the thoughts / memories. Since he'd been brought into the project earlier and was on-set in Budapest his role was to ensure the interview questions matched up with the memories we'd planned on producing.

While he was laying out time lines and establishing timing, I took over the visual effects work for individual shots that would be part of these memories. initially we'd planned on having 4 shots, only 1 of which was anticipated to involve 3d motion tracking and animating game models.

By the end of the project we had 10 vfx shots, 5 of which involved some tricky matchmoving, and 3 of those included animating models from the game into the shots. In all of these cases, I tracked the shots using PFTrack, animated and textured some of the game assets in Maya, and composited it all together in After Effects.

Pelican



Tribute



Covenant Sky



Probably the most complicated of the shots I worked on was the Banshee Attack. While initially this shot seemed to be an easy track, it turned out to be an incredibly difficult shot. In fact, due to a crazy exposure shift and the smoke that felt it had the right to casually waft through the shot, I never actually tracked the entire shot in one continuous take. Instead the shot was broken into 2 parts, before and after the banshee explodes. The explosion was done using footage from Detonation Films, and the rocket and contrails were done using Trapcode Particular.

Banshee Attack



The shot was later cut down to accommodate client request (and cover up the fact we had nothing for him to be shooting at when the camera panned back down).

After individual shots were finished and placed into their respective timelines they were treated with a process that jeremiah came up with to scramble them up and add that digital noise that's so indicative of a scrambled digital signal.

the last step of the project was to animate the various EKG / Brain activity meters that needed to reflect the soldiers stress levels as related to their memories.

At the end of the day, this turned out to be the kind of project I love. I got my hands dirty doing things like shooting extra assets and making a bomb (turns out everything I know about explosives comes from the Die Hard Movies), I pulled just about every compositing trick I could think of out of my hat. and walked away with a whole bunch of work I'm really proud of.

Halo 3: Believe

http://www.halo3.com/believe



Immediately following the work I did on the IRIS campaign I started getting briefed on Believe. This was to be the experiential site that was going to accompany a larger TV campaign. The Agency in charge of the TV spots had commissioned New Deal Studios to build a 30x40 foot diorama of the Battle of New Mombasa (where Master Chief saved the day... yet again) which was populated with several hundred figurines made by Stan Winston Studios.

The whole thing was shot on 2 motion control rigs over 2 days. The footage was then stitched together and had the sky roto'd out.

My involvement was doing the sky replacement (including learning how to do 3d tracking with no prior experience), roto for the various rotating characters that appear when you click one of the floating icons, and the motion tracking for all the clickable hotspots in the timeline.

CREDITS:
Executive Creative Director: Rei Inamoto
Creative Director: John Jakubowski
Associate Creative Director: Thiago Zanato Tripodi
Creative Lead: Hoj Jomehri
Art Director: Kevin Hsieh
Copywriters: Joel Kaplan/ Keith Hostert
Creative Developer: Jason Gatt
Title Sequence: Caio Lazzuri
Senior Designer: Alex Lyman
Motion Designer: Matt Law
Associate Motion Designer: Rian Devos
Producer: Nancy Cardillo/ Larry Ewing
Senior Technical Project Manager: Kirk Kepley
Group Account Director: Simon Jefferson
Account Director: Erica Power
Senior Account Executive: Nicole Biondi
Diorama: New Deal Studios (Director - Matt Gratzner)
Figurines: Stan Winston Studio
Sound Design: Richard Devine

Halo 3: Iris

Iris is one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on.  By the time it got to me the idea and structure had been flushed out but all I got was "we're going to make an ARG, it will be long and complicated, and at the end of each part we want there to be a video being played through an alien server."

When they asked for that they had no idea what anything was going to look like. The server, the environment it was housed in, and the video itself were all up for grabs.  So I along with my immediate supervisor set about designing the actual servers themselves.  We each came up with 4 different designs, and internally decided on 1 that could be subtly modified and repeated to create 5 different servers.  Mine didn't get chosen which meant I was tasked with the rest of the materials needed to make the servers.

This turned out to be the best job I could have ever hoped for.  I wound up being put in charge of all the environments that the servers would be housed in as well as all of the content videos that would play when the user figured out which symbol to click on.

There were Five in total.  For the most part they were edited with Final Cut Pro, and tweaked, colored, and effected in After Effects.  When the videos called for assets that couldn't be bought as stock footage, or shot locally, I wound up doing some work in Maya to fill in the gaps.

Below are the 5 videos:

Server 1

Server 2

Server 3

Server 4

Server 5